One of the token liberals on FOX News is blasting CBS for airing an Amazing Race broadcast this week that required contestants visiting Vietnam to watch a pro-communist musical show, recite a pro-communist poem, and then gather at an anti-American military site in Hanoi.
Bob Beckel–a cantankerous, longtime Democratic Party strategist who tried to get Walter Mondale into the White House in 1984–blasted the CBS show yesterday and today as a celebration of Ho Chi Minh, the deceased nationalist leader who led North Vietnam to victory more than three decades ago.
Beckel insisted the show was an obscene slight to U.S. soldiers who fought to keep South Vietnam free.
]
Beckel also claims he will rant about what he sees as a despicable slight until CBS management apologizes to Vietnam War veterans.
He said only an “idiot” could have allowed the anti-American maneuverings to be broadcast.
More than 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War. With the support of prominent Republicans, President Bill Clinton formalized relations with Vietnam during his term in the White House. Thousands of poor Vietnamese, though paid near-slave wages, nonetheless won employment from U.S.-based conglomerates such as Nike as a result of the renewed ties.
The Amazing Race, which is produced by legendary filmmaker Jerry Bruckheimer, is one of the most popular CBS primetime shows. Teams of contestants race against one another at various international locations in hopes of winning a grand prize.
The Vietnamese, especially those who live in Hanoi, proudly consider Ho Chi Minh the George Washington of their nation.
Orange County is home to the world's largest concentration of anti-communist, Vietnamese immigrants.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.